Victor Campbell carries a chunk of Tennessee Williams’s soul around New Orleans every day in a black leather briefcase. He keeps the rest of it in the back of his bedroom closet, in an olive-green Samsonite suitcase, the weight of half a man.

On a summer day in 1949, ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, novelist Donald Windham, painter Buffie Johnson, playwright Tennessee Williams, and writer-provocateur Gore Vidal gathered at Café Nicholson, a bohemian supper club set in the back courtyard of an antique store on New York City’s Upper East Side.